55-64 (edited)

55. If one does not have even a superficial knowledge of the history of Rome (to say nothing of its Attic predecessor), one cannot know nor speak intelligibly about Western, or Church, history.

56. What use is it for a writer to repudiate that which he wrote in the naive years of his ignorance? I, for one, will do no such thing, principally because at some future date will I doubtless look back on what I am writing now, however “correct” it may be according to my current level of spiritual illumination and view it as ignorant and naive, even childish and stupid.

57. Perhaps life itself – even the Christian life – is, alas, futile, vain, naive, and stupid. But to hold such a devastating and debilitating appraisal of one’s life as one is living it is indeed the height of self-sabotaging pessimism and will only amount to a kind of nihilism that will prevent one from accomplishing anything in this life, be it good or bad.

58. And yet, time does grant one a certain degree of perspective not afforded by any other phenomenon in the whole of creation. I, therefore, believe there is merit in capturing what time is attempting to communicate at every step it is unfolding. So, while I will not outright repudiate what I have written, I can certainly comment on it and converse with it, as one would converse with anyone who has written anything for posterity, whether that writing is worthy of posterity’s conversation or not.

59. The history of creation and, most importantly to man, the history of the human race, is a testament not to man’s glory but God’s. Specifically, His patience toward us which is our salvation. {2 Peter 3:15}

60. God chooses and alone has the power to choose whom He will and for what purpose. Otherwise, He would not be God; He could not be God.

61. Indeed, modern man does not rightly appraise the sovereignty of God as absolute, universal, immutable, and timeless in our day principally due to the triumphs of man’s reason and the strides it has made in conquering much of the unknown in the material world. So successful have Reasonable Men been at eradicating disease and hunger and poverty and inequality, and in securing “basic human rights” as well as checking the power of despots and tyrants that in former times was the rule of the day, such that man can no longer fathom how a God – chosen not by vote nor the general will of the consensus – could have more rights, even ultimate rights, over the individual than the individual has over himself, “the individual” who has brought about all these miraculous social, economic, and political so-called reforms.

62. For this reason is the Gospel so seemingly out of step with the current conditions that predominate modern Western Civilization. For the Gospel claims that all are born into sin and cannot do anything but sin in all that they may think or do and have everywhere fallen short of the glory of God and, because of these things, are dead in their trespasses from birth and can only be raised to life, like Lazarus, {John 11} by a fully sovereign and omnipotent God who thinks little of overriding man’s “free will” so as to exercise His divine purpose not only in the individual’s life but the whole of created life.

63. It is precisely because we modern “freedom lovers” do not implicitly respect authority and have, in fact, never known true authority at any time in our lives that we cannot fathom God’s limitless authority over all things seen and unseen.

64. In much the same way that a willful, self-aware molecule in my own body would necessarily disrupt, undermine, and, like nuclear fission, split both my physical body and the whole of my reality in two with all the requisite violence that atomic fission in every case elicits would the effect be if a single human soul somehow became willful and began acting on his own for himself.